Join us to celebrate Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, hosts of the eponymous podcast. Author Ben Miller will be joined by writer and professor Grace Lavery. Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs, but the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. Everyone remembers Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those “bad gays” whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and notorious gangster Ronny Gray, Bad Gays tells the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. According to The Washington Post, “Bad Gays succeeds in its goals in every way, offering an infuriating, thoughtful, deliciously judgmental history of the very worst we had to offer.”

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Safety protocol

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.

Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register.

Ben Miller is a writer and researcher. He is a Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin, has taught on queer history, literature, and visual cultures at the Humboldt Universität and The New Centre for Research & Practice, and has collaborated with artists including Elijah Burgher and AA Bronson. A regular contributor to the Arts and Leisure pages of The New York Times, Ben’s essays, criticism, and fiction have been additionally published in Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin Magazine, SAND, Apogee Journal, and Tin House. Since 2018, Ben has been a member of the board of the Schwules Museum, one of the world’s largest independent institutions dedicated to archiving and exhibiting queer histories and visual cultures.

Grace Lavery is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, and affiliated faculty in the Department for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her research focuses on the history of interpretation during the period of modernity, with particular focus on the relations between three figures: the psychic device, the transsexual body, and the aesthetic phenomenon. Otherwise, she works across genres of writing and of cultural object, publishing scholarly monographs, experimental memoir, and genre fiction. Her first book, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, won the North American Victorian Studies Associations Best Book of the Year award in 2020. Her second, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis, explores the literary and cultural forerunners of the transition memoir, especially through readings and détournements of Hardy, Wilde, and Dickens. Her third, PLEASURE AND EFFICACY: FEMINISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND TRANS EMBODIMENT, explores the history of trans feminist techniques of physical and mental transition, from George Eliot to Kevin Rowland. She is currently completing a book-length essay on the American sitcom, and a campus whodunnit. Her scholarly essays have been published in Critical Inquiry; Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Criticism; Transgender Studies Quarterly; PMLA; Social Text, and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly, and writes publicly for multiple readerships, occasionally reviewing films for Bitch and Catapult, books for The Guardian, and publishing personal essays in them.us, Gay Magazine, Autostraddle, and many others.